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The page works great in IE-Win/Mac and Opera-Win <added>and even in Netscape 6!</added>... But in NN4.X (both Win/Mac - which a good number of our visitors use) the left hand scroll bar is missing on the page. If you re-size the browser window small enough that you'd have to scroll down to the bottom of the page, there's no scroll bar to scroll with. Certainly a bad thing for our longer pages, and smaller-monitor visitors...
Can any NN users/CSS experts tell me why the NN scroll bar diappeared? Other than that bug, they layout allows our pages to resize to fit most monitors, allows positioning of the 'real' page content at the top of the HTML, and allows me to use a single header and footer file across 99% of my pages... all very good things.
As much as I'd like to say, "if NN 4 is THAT standards incompliant, forget it," it's a business site and we can't afford to alienate visitors.
I'll definitely be watching this thread closely. I have a page where some Netscape users report no scrollbars, but I can't reproduce the effect. Maybe your answer will help me find my answer.
Assuming you mean one right hand scroll bar, which is what I see in IE, the site looks fine in NS 4.07.
The floating left navbar menu is a fabulous effect... I've never seen it done before.
I just went to your site again, and this time I didn't get a scrollbar. Then I went back to a forum window, covering the window with your site. When I clicked back and checked your site again, the scroll bar was there.
>>If you re-size the browser window small enough that you'd have to scroll down to the bottom of the page, there's no scroll bar to scroll with. >>
Have you tried to reload the page after you size the window down ? DW has a function for reloading netscape to properly re-adjust to new window sizes.
OK... I am getting scrollbars with Netscape 4.72/Mac (at home). The two copies of Netscape I have at work were the ones that didn't work... I've got the newest 4.X versions for WIndows & Mac at work (whichever those two are... don't recall offhand). The scrollbar is missing on both those machines.
As for the Netsape 'resize' bug... I *have* tried reloading it after a resize. Still no scroll bar.
In this case, I'd like to find a way to force the window to resize (but not reload), because the top green table is wider than the rest of the page *before* it's resized, but scales to proper size *after* the resize. Kinda like the resize bug reversed... But no scroll bar either way.
The floating left navbar menu is a fabulous effect...
Thanks! Took quite a bit of tinkering to ge tthat one working... but the new design eliminates it. LOL... Just like me! Sweat over design "A", then toss it out the window in favor of design "B" shortly thereafter...
I'm doing a page that relies heavily on layers but i'm using the DIV tag to position I have tested it on NN and IE on PC and Mac, it looks fine.
Am i missing something? Why did you have to use <layer>tags? I would like to avoid any future problems.
Before I added the Layer tags, Netscape would display the page correctly on first load, but would immediately bump the header section to the bottom of the page when the window was resized. Once I added the layer tags, the header stayed in the right place after resizing the window.
I suppose I could pull out the layer tags, and add the aforementioned on-resize reload command... but either way, I have to add garbage to the code to make Netscape digest it even halfway properly...
BWA-HA-HA-Ha-Ha-ha-ha-heeee.... (and other maniacal sounds of mirth and frustration) I just checked the page on my office Mac again... and the scrollbars worked JUST FINE! I swear they weren't there Friday... I swear.... ARGH! OK, if Netscape's rendering bugs aren't even consistent enough to work around, forget it. Netscape 4.X users get what they get. (It hurts to say that... I used to be a real Netscape devotee.)
After noticing that scrollbars sometimes failed to appear with IE as well, and deciding that it was, therefore, serious enough to fix, it occurred to me that the browsers might be choking on the fact that the page is laid out in <div> containers with no specified height... so they didn't know whether to scroll, or clip, or what. I added this line to my .css file, and no missing scrollbars since:
body { overflow: scroll }
Just tells the browser to make a scroll bar for any content in the <body> tag. Haven't seen a missing scroll bar since adding that line...
I'm working on some design ideas for frame-like pages that would use position:fixed and overflow:scroll for the main content div. I should be done testing soon.
It will be nice to scroll just the body content, not the nav or header, and still not have the complications that frames can create. Just depends on what kind of browser support I discover, whether I feel this design can really fly or not.
If you specified the header and content/body area as two separate <div> containers, you might be able to attach the overflow: scroll specification to just the content <div>, while leaving the header <div> static, with a specific height.
*sigh* OK, so the overflow: scroll trick works fine, as long as you are using links to navigate the site. If you type a URL into the Address window in IE 5/Mac, there's no scroll bar again. Until you resize the page...
I'll sort all this out eventually.
body { height: 100%; overflow: scroll }
So far I haven't seen a page with a missing scrollbar yet. Will keep my eyes peeled, but at this moment, the problem does appear to be solved!
I wish my adventures were so fruitful. The browser support for position:fixed is woefully bad. I've been playing around with the code suggested in the O'Reilly CSS book as a replacement for frames functionality, and only Netscape 6 comes even close to support (but not close enough to count), with Opera next in line. The MSIE 6 preview is way out in left field.
But this is CSS-2, so I guess I'll just have to wait. Theoretically it would be awesome.
What ya tryin to do? I only ever use position:fixed
I want to use position:fixed to keep the two divs that make up the inverted "L" positioned in the same spot relative to the viewport, rather than in the same spot relative to the page, ala position:absolute.
That way they won't scroll off and only the content should scroll. Or so says O'Reilly, anyway.
Here's the kind of .css file they suggested:
div#header {color:white; position:fixed; top:0; bottom:80%; left:20%; right:0; background:navy;}
div#navbar {color:white; position:fixed; top:0; bottom:0; left:0; right:80%; background:blue;}
div#main {color:navy; position:absolute; top:20%; bottom:0; left:20%; right:0; overflow:scroll; background:white;}
[photowebber.com...]
there is a good tip.
You only have to add:
<p> </p><p> </p>
just before the </BODY> tag, and it works fine!
<p> </p><p> </p>
Sorry
You should be able to use the position: absolute which would hold the inverted L in place then you just have to worry about making the page scroll ;)
You should also set some kind of width and height attribute on the layers too.
I'll check it out on the NT machine later, and if NN 4/Windows is still hiccupping I'll try the <p> fix. Seems odd, but I've definitely heard of stranger things in the wonderful world of HTML. ;)
Tedster - I've never quite been clear about the difference between "fixed" and "absolute"... so I just use "absolute" for everything. I figure by the time the ver. 7 browsers come out, CSS2 might become a useable reality...
--iang
However, body { height: 100%; overflow: auto } seems to acheive the best of both worlds: reliable scroll bars in NN4.X and IE 5.X, while the page remains usable in NN6.
(NN6 still mangles the width of the top nav table, but that's another headache, and not a functional problem, so I'm not sweating it. Our whopping 3 NN6 visitors can probably cope.)
As I understand it, "position:fixed" is supposed to "fix" the div in relation to the viewport (that is, the monitor/screen) itself. Scrolling the document would not move the fixed div at all.
"position:absolute" sets the div's position in relation to the page, a certain number of pixels down and to th left from the very top -- but the div still scrolls relative to the viewport.
i've been pulling my hair like crazy trying to figure out why my NS 4.7x simply refuses to render the scrollbars when i put my content in <div>'s, and was fortunate enough to find this column. unfortunately, the only solution that worked was the <p> </p> hack, and i can't really use that one since it pushes some of my relatively-positioned content down. the BODY tag stuff (overflow: auto; height: 100%) looked promising but i still have no luck. i've noticed that the missing scrollbar is a combination of completely random rendering (my friend thinks netscape has a non-deterministic rendering algorithm =p) and having the content of a div in a single table... if my content is broken up into several tables, paragraphs, etc., my scrollbars are usually ok, but any single-table chunks screw it up. anyone come up with any other hacks to fix this?
thanks,
marc
I continually run into some kind of limitation on div size -- past a certain limit, Netscape just chokes and stops rendering the page, scrollbars and all.
It's not a straightforward limit (sometimes many screens full will render just fine), but it seems to vary with the complexity of other div's on the page. I've also seen that Netscape on a Mac seems even touchier in this regard than the PC version.
I wish I had it figured out more precisely -- right now it's just test, test, and test some more. I have one client site that uses a lot of absolute positioning, and this is where my problems come up the most.
